


A path from stone

by laughingpineapple



Category: Myst Series
Genre: Diary, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-17
Updated: 2011-11-17
Packaged: 2017-10-26 05:24:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/279177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Yeesha leaves her parents to live alone in Tomahna, with little hope for yet another beginning, Atrus goes back to what is left of his Ages to find peace and, most of all, perspective. Selenitic seems to offer just that. And space amoebas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A path from stone

 

#### 

 **A path from stone**

  
113.9.13 I have come back to find peace and peace is what this place offers. Its sounds have not changed; I still find myself delighted by their resonances, halting every few steps to listen to the dripping water and the deep rumble of the magmatic vein. I wonder if my old recording machinery still works. Fearing this past is futile, I should have returned earlier. Now that Yeesha, too, is gone, it seems like going in circles. I cannot afford to lose everything.  
A rustle in the grass catches my attention.

\-- I am investigating this new noise.

\-- The lake is teeming with creatures! The waters are as murky as I remember them, and the heavy fog makes them indistinguishable from as near as six steps from the shore. A close look, however, reveals lumps of translucent masses, each extending from a nucleus similar to that of a cell. Some float alone, going with the current like inert jellyfishes; others have joined at the edges, forming shapes capable of independent movement. Their rhythmic contractions are hypnotizing.  
I hesitate to write this, but it may be a fair assumption that some such clusters have already moved onto the land.

\-- I remember no such living form during my previous visits to this Age. Where did they originate? I have but one answer: from the sky. The very meteors which created the Age as it is now must have carried micro-organisms and somehow, Selenitic must have proven to be the perfect habitat for them. I regret building upon the meteorite without examining it in depth. I would like to have some  clue to what sort of ancestors these creatures had.

\-- This makes me wonder. I have always known the leaves of the Great Tree to be more than the horizons we see, or even the planets we stand on. But to be able to see something so far removed from the small corner that I had written in my Book... it gives that knowledge substance. The rock which rests at the center of the lake came from another world in this Age, where life was beginning. It is evolving here. Even at home, I will look at the skies with renewed wonder.

\-- But most of all, I feel that I have been given hope. The creatures (and I wouldn't know where to place the singular; a thorough observation is due) are moving and they are mutating as I write. Life. I could not have predicted it back then, as I linked away from those scorching meteorites, nor after the storm had subsided and I had gone back to its bleak aftermath. A lifetime from now, who knows what I will trace back to this barren present?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 _“My love, you wouldn't believe...! That first visit on Selenitic, so many years ago...”  
Catherine smiled and caressed the pen in her pocket. In a sense, it had always happened._

 

 

 

 _  
_

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hurt/comfort through giant space amoebas: this is how we roll.  
> ...let's say that the Books in Myst 1 are their Ages' Descriptive Books, or that Selenitic's survived somehow (J'nanin and Serenia did, at the very least, so it's safe to say that not everything had been destroyed).  
> Originally posted on deviantArt as an actual hand-written, clickable diary for Myst Fanclub's "Words fail" contest: http://laughingpineapple.deviantart.com/art/A-path-from-stone-a-journal-254773707
> 
> English is obviously not my first language - I hope I haven't butchered anything.


End file.
